As digital hardware is more readily available, people are personalizing documents in a wide variety of ways. Frequently, documents include images that are designed to be scaled to specific page sizes. For example, people frequently like to incorporate professionally designed borders in their photos, newsletters, postcards, greeting cards and the like. As these images become more and more complex, they frequently incorporate elements that are designed for a specific page size. However, given the multitude of graphic design programs that allow people to resize their documents to any desired size, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible for a graphic designer to create different versions of the same design for each possible page size.
Typically, current automatic image resizing programs simply scale an original image to fit a new page size without regard to the original design intent of the original image. For example, FIG. 1 depicts an original image 10 that has been resized from an original 4×5 template size to a 4×10 template size (at 12). As shown, the ducks that are used as upper border elements 31 have been stretched to fit the width of the image size, distorting the original proportions and overall look of the ducks. Moreover, depending upon the method used to stretch the image, the relative proportions of the side edge elements to the top and bottom edge elements may be altered, so that instead of having an image with the same size border all around the edge, the side edge may be thicker or thinner than the top or bottom edges (compare, e.g. w1 with w2). Furthermore, some of the image resizing programs simply crop the portions of the images that do not fit onto the new page size, after enlarging the original image, if necessary. Such cropping could clearly damage the design intent of an image including components such as that shown in FIG. 1.
Accordingly, methods and systems for automatically resizing an image while maintaining the original design intent of the image are needed.